Playful | Fun | Simple

I have so many to share so I am going to keep this short and sweet. I loved working with these guys. One thing that made this day so special is it was also the bride's parent's 30th wedding anniversary!

I always say this but I really do love fall in Boise. So warm and beautiful. Today was one of those days and perfect day to photograph this little family of three. Hazel was SO happy to be running free through the park!

I'm 28. When I tell you I've known this lady for 23 years, that shows you how long we've known each other. We met in kindergarten and we graduated high school together. When she asked me to photograph her and her husband to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary I was so excited.

It was another gorgeous day in Boise, though we were worried we were going to get chased away by the rain. Luckily it stayed far, far away! I had so much fun hanging out with these guys tonight. Here are a few of my favorites:

I will be the first to admit that I love wood design in homes. I love hardwood floors, old wood decor, and anything else in between.

While deciding the prints I wanted to hang in my office I had to ask myself the type of stuff I would want for my own home. Unique pieces. Stuff that you cant really get anywhere else.

Of course my first thought was definitely wood prints. Not every photo looks good on wood, but I realized most of my clientele choose outdoor locations, therefore most photos would look good.

You might recognize the image above. It was my timeline photo on my Facebook page for a while. I love the simplicity of it. The fact that most of the image is the tree made it a perfect candidate for wood print.

Would you believe that this is a 30"x40" print? To give you a better idea:

And to give you a few up-close glimpses:

I also ordered a few smaller wood pieces:

And one more printed on burlap:

This post is getting lengthy but one last note. Some people have a hard time deciding what size they should have an image printed. The idea of an 12"x18" or 11"x14" might sound giant, but once you get it on the wall you realize how small they really are.

While I had all of my samples in one place, I wanted to give some perspective. Note the middle image is actually a metal print. I'll be showing those on the blog tomorrow.

As fast as summer came, it went. I'm not much of a winter person so I'm sad to see summer go. This summer has been full of great families, cute babies, and wonderful couples. Though I've neglected the blog over the last few months I definitely have been staying busy. I just finished the last wedding of the year so you will be seeing lots of activity here. I can't wait to share all the fun photos I've been working on. Of course, you can always see the current stuff I'm doing over on my Facebook Page. The blog usually gets last priority when I'm busy.
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Remember the guest post from Monday? Here are their photos.
I had a great time photographing these two. There was a connection right away and we all were just comfortable. These two are absolutely adorable together. They've been married 3 years and you would think that they just got married. They also needed little direction which always makes my job super easy (even though it was in the 90's that day).

Here are some of my favorites.

Boise has lots of awesome wall art in downtown. I have been wanting to shoot at this wall forever. That also seemed to be the theme for the whole session - murals.

I was doing photos for some clients and we came to the conversation of wedding photos. This poor couple had an awful wedding photography experience and were gracious enough to share it with you.I mainly want to share this because I feel that it's super important to really get to know your photographer and do your research. These guys were married ONLY 3 YEARS AGO. Which means this was totally recent. You hear lots of horror stories with people getting married 10+ years ago, but it still happens today.

Thanks again Allison for sharing your story.

PS. If you're reading this in Google Reader you won't notice the issue, but I apologize if my blog doesn't look like there much formatting (spacing, paragraph breaks). Still working on fixing that. Bear with me.

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My wedding photos made me cry, and they weren't tears of joy.

Hello Everyone! I am so excited to guest blog for Tamara! My first guest blogging experience.

A few weeks ago Tamara did a photo shoot for me and my husband. The reason? We didn’t get engagement photos taken and our wedding photos are terrible. No really, like the worst wedding photos you have ever seen.
Before we get to the photos, I’ll give you a little bit of a back story…
I was living in northern Idaho, and our wedding took place in Reno Nevada (no I didn’t get married in a drive through chapel, Reno is my hometown). Because I was far away my mom was doing lots of the leg work for the wedding. I would find vendors and locations online and then she and my aunts, cousins, and maid of honor would go check them out, I think they actually quite liked this part, and then report back to me, and we’d make a decision on each particular item. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t that stressful for me either!
When it came time to look for photographers, my mom told me that she had been talking with some ladies at her gym, and that she had a couple of names for me to check out. Most of the photographers had websites, but one woman didn’t. We both checked out the websites, and my mom went to the office of the woman with out the website, but I didn’t. I took my mom’s word that her photos were good. My mom and I narrowed it down to two photographers, the woman who didn’t have a website, and a guy who did.
Through this process I discovered that one of my friends from high school who had recently been married had used the woman photographer. I sent a facebook message to my friend asking about her experience, she responded that she had had a great experience and pointed out to me which photos on her facebook page were taken by this photog.

The photos all looked nice. My mom told me that she preferred the woman’s style to the mans, and that the woman was a bit more reasonably priced. So we went with the female photographer.

Biggest.mistake.of.my.wedding. Seriously.

The worst part? She was great on the actual day! She was personable, yet directive enough to rope the bridal party and families to where they needed to be for
our “requested shots.” Almost. There were some key shots that we don’t have. We have zero pictures of: just me, the entire bridal party together (bridesmaids,
groomsman, the two of us), and only one or two of just the two of us. Even that could be forgivable to me, if the photos were good. But they aren’t. They are
terrible. Photos have weird shadows on them, all of the pictures of the ceremony are blurry, the pictures of our reception are all dark. I have better pictures taken by my aunt who has a basic DSLR camera that she uses as a hobby.

It was a huge disappointment to receive photos like this after our wedding.

Fast forward a few years to our photo shoot with Tamara. I was really hoping that the session would capture “us” in a way that our wedding photos didn’t. And it did. I LOVE the pictures. Even though we aren’t wearing our wedding attire, I already want to replace every wedding photo in our house with these photos.

So moral of the story? Seriously research your photographer, and if they don’t have a website? Forget about it.